Collaborative Research: Climate, land use, and the rise and fall of powerful Sub-Saharan African societies

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Key information for predicting the effects of land uses and climatic change on modern societies can come from reconstructing the environments and trajectories of major cultures of the past. Ethiopia has three properties that make it among the most important locations for understanding the extent to which interactions between environment and land use influence societal developments. First, its societies presently suffer consequences of land use and climate change. Second, its long history of human settlement includes great migrations, an agricultural origin, and the rise and fall of important civilizations; all with incompletely understood links to land use and ecological change. Third, Ethiopia's topography provides gradients of climates in which to develop and calibrate methods of reconstructing paleoenvironments. The researchers will take advantage of the second property to reconstruct the paleoenvironments of the past 7000 years in an area of northern Ethiopia that was a probable center of origin of agriculture and in which several sophisticated societies have risen and fallen. Experiments that take advantage of the third property will also be conducted at research stations along a climate and elevation gradient. A major hypothesis examined for this project is that there are repeatable relationships between climate, land use, and the rise and fall of the societies that have inhabited the highlands of northern Ethiopia. The project also addresses two problems with reconstructing past environments: 1) accuracy of interpretation, and 2) separating effects of climate and land use as a result. Several methods will be used to reconstruct environment; including pedological and stratigraphic analyses, bulk and stable isotopic analyses of several elements in soil organic matter, and modeling of basin hydrology. Environment and land use are not the only factors that influence a society's advances and declines. Nonetheless, evidences are accumulating that decisions about resource use informed by knowledge of environment and land use interactions have permitted some of the oldest societies to persist at high levels of development. The project can directly inform land use management decisions in the drought and famine prone highlands of Ethiopia. The research will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher in both the United States and Ethiopia. It will also promote collaboration between scientists in the two countries. This project is cofunded by the Office of International Science and Engineering.